Foreigners
by Belphegor
Summary: 2003: Seventeen-year-old Sarah Hollis was sometimes puzzled by her dad's reactions to seemingly trifling details, but he was her dad, and she loved him. Then there was The Hat Thing. Not slash.


Author's Note: Well, I didn't think my first try at _Watchmen_ fanfiction would be so successful!! Thank you all for the kind reviews and the favourites :o) I also didn't think I would be back so soon, but there you go – another plot bunny did a number on me. Thanks a _**lot**_ again to ChaosandMayhem and Grieverwings, my two fantastic betas :o]

I don't know what you'll think of this little piece, because it's hardly relevant to the universe of _Watchmen_ – it's just me trying to paint a picture of Sam Hollis (around 2003) through the eyes of his frequently puzzled seventeen-year-old daughter. Who, by the way, doesn't don a costume, doesn't save the world, but is sometimes baffled and a little concerned at times by her dad's reaction to what looks like trifling things – like a certain fedora, for instance :o)

_Disclaimer: Watchmen belongs (belong?) to Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, even if Zack Snyder did a pretty nifty job on the film. Which I can't wait to get my hands on when it comes out on DVD, but that's another story entirely._

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"_Children are all foreigners_."  
Ralph Waldo Emerson's _Journals_, 1839.

"_The winds of March that made my heart a dancer,__  
A telephone that rings,__And who's to answer?  
__Oh, how the ghost of you clings  
These foolish things remind me of you …_"

(Harry Link, Holt Marvell and Jack Strachey, interpreted by Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald …)

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**Foreigners**

Although seventeen-year-old Sarah Hollis loved her dad, really, sometimes she couldn't understand him.

Sammy usually said she shouldn't bother to try, but Sammy could be a bigger idiot than she had any right to be. Being thirteen doesn't excuse you of everything, despite what she seemed to believe. Just because her baby sister loved to go to the gym and beauty parlour with Mom and spend time doing girly stuff didn't mean that she should give up on doing stuff with Dad.

It did get a little difficult every once in a while, because as far as the two girls were concerned, Sam Hollis was easily the strangest dad in the world.

Fortunately, as far as Sarah was concerned, he was also the best. And not in the 'Best-Dad-In-The-World-Written-On-Cheap-Mugs' kind of way. Hers was the real thing.

Sammy could say what she liked, Sarah had spent many a rainy Sunday afternoon in the basement, watching her father tinker with things. He was astonishingly good at taking objects to pieces and putting all of them together again, and watching him work then was more interesting than any episode of _MacGyver_ – admittedly, _sans_ chewing gum and duct tape. His usually slightly droopy eyes suddenly shone with an intensity and concentration that resonated through his whole body and made him look younger than he was. His hands seemed to gain a life and will of their own as he worked, moving with precision and quick efficiency until he pushed his glasses up his nose and turned to face her with a warm smile.

"Done."

He had even repaired the infuriating talking bear, the one that annoyed the hell out of he and Mom when Sarah had been six, just because she'd been crying broken-heartedly.

Yup, Dad was a tinkerer, and he was darn good at it.

He was also pretty absent-minded, though Sarah always figured it came with the 'inventor' package. While she was aware that he probably wouldn't pull a Doc Brown on her and design a time machine, she was willing to bet he could make anything short of a man-sized airship. And even _that_ didn't seem so far-fetched.

Mom had possibly put her foot down at that point, come to think of it.

He had an encyclopaedic knowledge of birds of any shape and size. Sarah _loved_ to hear him talk about it – the fact that she was scared to death of any feathered creature never needed to be taken into account. She also harboured a slightly guilty pleasure at witnessing other people's eyes glaze over after a prolonged conversation on spotted owlets and long-eared owls.

He had the same droopy brown eyes, slightly hooked nose and quiet smile Sarah had. A few years ago, when she had been going through a short-haired, rebellious phase, she had noticed that she had the same funny tufts of hair on the sides of her forehead that just wouldn't stay down, even with tons of hairspray.

In short, it was widely acknowledged – particularly at school – that quiet, nerdy Sarah Hollis had a lot in common with her oddball father.

But he remained something of a puzzle.

For one, she could never figure out what made him so sad sometimes.

Not that he showed it, though; most of the time he was just day-to-day, regular Dad, with his soft smile and his funny little habits that Mom pretended she hated (like putting too much sugar in his coffee or leaving his socks lying all around their room), always a kind ear when you had a bad day and a kind word to make it better. When Mom got all worked-up or frustrated over some incident at work or the dirty dishes piling up in the sink, he would simply put his arms around her, whisper stuff into her ear that Sarah never heard – not that it was her business anyway – and her frown would break into a grin. Generally, he rolled up his sleeves and did the dishes, as well, and they talked while Mom wiped.

But Sarah had watched him when he thought no one did. It was subtle, and barely there, but she was certain she'd seen right – the corners of his mouth drooped a little, his shoulders sagged, and he suddenly looked much older than his fifty-seven.

Mom had this kind of moments too from time to time, but it was much harder to catch her then.

Sammy said it must have something to do with the Alien Day, because those moments seemed to grow more frequent – or more noticeable – each time November drew closer. But since Samantha Hollis prided herself on always having something to say on every possible topic, Sarah always had trouble sorting out the actually interesting from the rubbish.

She might have a point on this one, though.

Still, if the 1985 New York Alien Massacre was the one and only solution to the riddle that was her dad, Sarah was former President Redford. There was no way it was as simple as that.

She's spotted little hints and clues every now and then, but they usually left her more mystified than anything. Like that time a couple of years ago when she had been doing the dishes singing – or attempting to sing, really – a Billie Holiday song and she'd turned round to see her dad staring at her as though he'd just been on the receiving end of a Bruce Lee-worthy kick in the stomach.

First, she had no idea he knew, let alone loved Billie Holiday as he later told her he did – they never listened to the stuff at home, and she'd discovered it through a friend. Second, the sudden blank look on his face had been unsettling, bordered on disturbing. It hadn't lasted longer than three or four seconds, but it had left her unnerved and seriously wondering what was so freaky about "I Cover The Waterfront".

The biggest hint, though, was The Hat Thing.

It had been a Saturday afternoon, Mom had taken Sammy out shopping for a Halloween costume (in spite of her repeated claims that almost thirteen was _way_ too old to go trick-or-treating) and Dad had been upstairs working on stuff he'd brought home, and it just seemed such a _good_ idea to go down to the basement and nose around.

The basement wasn't just some basement. It was The Basement. The ultimate one. Comic book villains' treasure troves had nothing on the Hollises' basement.

It wasn't that big, really, but it certainly felt huge because of the sheer volume of generally useless junk neatly heaped on shelf upon shelf and filling drawers and closets. The more bulky contraptions – like the electrically-powered bike Dad had designed long before those hit the stores and went all trendy – were generally stocked into corners or hung up the walls on bear-sized hooks, leaving the floor clear enough to go pretty much everywhere. One wall was completely devoted to tools, and each one had its place outlined with white marker. Blowtorches and electrical drills lined up with screwdrivers and wire cutters. Like Dad said, "You never know a good tool might come in handy."

The air was stuffy and dry and smelled of paint and grease. The neon lights, once you turned them on, cast a bleak, crude light on everything, and it always was slightly cooler down here than the rest of the house was.

Sarah adored it. She had spent countless hours curled up in the old, frayed but so comfy armchair, listening to the tinny, crackling sound of her father's radio, watching him work and learning the difference between a box-end wrench and an open-end one and their multiple uses.

Sometimes she brought a book, because the atmosphere was always so peaceful. It was there that she had perused the works of Chester Himes and Dashiell Hammett, because there was just something fascinating about the idea of dogged, washed-out cops or detectives pacing up and down rainy streets looking for an atom of truth and justice in an unforgiving world.

Sometimes she rolled up her sleeves and helped Dad in one of his little projects, generally ending up with dirty oil stuck under her fingernails for days but feeling undeniably proud when he showed the gizmo to Mom and Sammy and said "we" had done it. Sammy often looked a little cross then, but Sarah thought, uncharitably perhaps, that she _would_ get her hands dirty once in a while if she really wanted to share the limelight in those moments.

Sometimes she just rummaged through the paraphernalia in search of something interesting that she didn't know about yet.

That was what she had set out to do _that_ day.

She was sitting on the concrete floor, investigating the contents of a large cardboard box that once upon a time seemed to have contained a pair of size ten rubber boots when her eye caught the feet of a smallish chest of drawers that a massive closet blocked from view.

The bits of fluff under it – some as big as her fist – gave clues to how well-hidden this chest might be. No broom nor vacuum must have come anywhere near it in _years_.

This in itself was unusual enough that it called for a closer study. Sarah squeezed behind the closet to get a better look.

Beneath the coat of dust so thick it changed the colour of the paint – which was peeling anyway – the chest was inconspicuous enough. The first drawer was empty, except for some dust balls, and smelled musty and ancient. The second was just as bad, but at least she saw something in the bad light.

A notebook. A big one, filled with what looked like press cuttings someone had taken great pains to gather and neatly glue to each page.

The notebook's last couple of pages were empty, the collection seemingly abandoned. Almost all the articles were about costumed heroes of the Forties and Sixties.

"Wow," Sarah couldn't help but breathe. _Didn't know Dad was into the stuff when he was younger_. She felt a grin pull at the corners of her mouth at the thought of a twenty-year-old Sam Hollis eagerly browsing the paper, armed with a pair of scissors and a pot of glue, searching for articles interesting enough to cut and paste.

She stopped for a second to look at a picture from the mid '60s – the date said 6/5/1966 – of two costumed heroes handing the cops a curvy, scantily-clad handcuffed woman. Well, one was at least, grinning widely from what she could make out, while the other one (a shorter guy in an odd kind of mask, the grain of the paper prevented her from seeing it clearly) was standing stiffly, his hands in his pockets. And the woman, unbelievably enough, was smiling back at her captors with such poise and self-confidence than it almost gave the impression of a photo shoot rather than an arrest. As though it was all a fun game of cat and mouse.

Sarah shook her head. Many folks claimed they did weird things in the sixties, but flower-haired hippies on pot had nothing on costumed heroes when it came to plain old weirdness.

_Funny Dad never mentioned having collected all this stuff_, she thought with a grin, closing the second drawer and opening the third with some difficulty. It wasn't that unexpected, though – her dad was so much of a geek already, she thought fondly, that imagining a younger version of him as a devoted fanboy wasn't that big a stretch.

She frowned at the little unbidden voice at the back of her mind whispering that he never mentioned liking Billie Holiday before either. As if he had a previous life that had gone forgotten till now.

The last drawer, like the previous one, was almost empty. When the dust had settled, the neon light glinted on something and drew Sarah's attention on a pair of old goggles, like a mix between an aviator's and an Olympic swimmer's. She took them, fondly noting all the funny little mechanisms and devices – this was her dad's handiwork, all right. There was no doubt that he had designed them; they had night vision and a built-in zoom, could tell the temperature and pressure of the room … The design in itself was a little bit old-fashioned, but they were cute and it was fun to imagine her dad working on gadgets like these. That much hadn't changed, whatever he still wasn't saying about what he used to like. It was a shame to have forgotten those goggles at the bottom of an old dusty chest of drawers.

She gently put them back where she had found them and jumped as her hand brushed against something else that she hadn't seen.

When she tugged on the drawer to open it wider she saw that it was a hat.

A fedora, to be precise.

The kind that wouldn't be out-of-place on Sam Spade's head. It certainly looked worn enough to fit the period. The original fabric was flattened and glazed in patches and covered in dust, and the ghost of a musky scent clung to it like a mussel to its favourite rock.

In short, the hat fairly reeked of mystery, and Sarah loved mysteries. She took it carefully, turning it over in her hands.

It had to be a relic of some sort, she decided, because the smell was nothing like her dad's and there seemed to be no real monetary value to it. The lack-lustre felt was brown, with a headband that might have been blue at some point. Or possibly purple. There was no way to tell for sure.

Maybe it was the incongruity of that old battered hat forgotten in the bottom of a drawer. Maybe it was the feeling it gave of not so much having been worn as _lived_ _with_, continuously, and for a _long_ time. Odd, considering the total absence of bits of hair stuck on the inside.

She was in all probability putting way too much thought into it, but the fact remained that this hat, whoever it belonged to (or used to belong to) felt important. She wondered whether its former owner missed it – or indeed, whether he or she was still alive now to miss it.

There was something a bit chilling about this thought and she wasn't sure why. People died every day, after all.

She could have stayed this way for a while, absent-mindedly fingering the hat and letting her mind wander. Maybe she did, too, and just wasn't aware of it. But a sudden sound – made all the more sharp and loud by the lack of almost any other noise in the basement – startled her into a small gasp.

Her father was in front of her. Except it wasn't her dad. Not as she knew him.

His usually warm brown eyes – _Brown like mine_, whispered a small part of Sarah's brain that hadn't frozen solid – had gone blank, much more so than that time two years ago when the look on his face had almost made her drop the plate she had been cleaning. But there also was something icy lurking in their depths that was so alien to him it made him almost unrecognisable.

She didn't know whether it was just plain anger or something else, but never had she felt so much like being caught red-handed in the middle of something expressly forbidden and unutterably foolish.

He looked so stunned he seemed to have gone beyond shocked and out the other side.

"_Put that down_."

It would have been so much better – reassuring – if he had shouted, even if he practically never did. His voice right now was slow, deliberate, devoid of its usual rich tones. It was a stranger's voice, and Sarah decided she didn't like this stranger. At all.

She didn't know him, and it frightened her to no end.

Hands shaking, she let go of the hat – which fell back into the drawer, forgotten once more – and darted to the door, her guts in a twist and the tell-tale sting of tears behind her eyes.

When she finally got to her bedroom, she closed the door and gently collapsed against it, drawing her knees to her chest and trying not to give in to the sobs that racked her body. Failing pathetically in the process.

She wasn't sure what shook her the most – the feeling that her father, one of the human beings she loved and trusted the most in the world, had looked at her as though she was a stranger, a foreigner who didn't belong there, or the fleeting impression of having caught a glimpse of something private to her dad and completely alien to her, that she was not supposed to see and should never have seen.

She knew he kept secrets – few of them, but he and Mom kept them well. She just wasn't prepared for one of those secrets to leap at her face and scare her.

Hours passed, or maybe seconds. She didn't know which.

There was a gentle, tentative knock on the door, and the soft voice of her dad drifted through.

"Sarah? Are you in there, sweetie?"

It should be infuriating that he still called her 'sweetie' at seventeen years old. Oddly enough, it never was.

She drew out a shuddering breath and blew her runny nose. "Yeah."

"Are you okay?"

Through her tears, she couldn't help a chuckle. A small, rather bitter one. "No."

She heard a small sigh. Who was it behind the door anyway? Her dad, or the stranger who hadn't yelled at her in the basement? "What was that about?" she muttered shakily.

"I'm – I'm sorry, sweetheart." Hearing his usual subtle stammer was reassuring. He always did that when he was unsure or apologetic. "I guess I, uh – I overreacted."

"You overreacted!? _Dad_," she said louder in retrospective anger, her voice still shaking. "you scared the snot out of me." She wiped her wet cheeks and tried to not sniff, the lump from earlier back in her throat. Then the question she had been pushing away – because it was ridiculous and irrational – resurfaced, and she swallowed hard.

"What'd I do wrong?" she whispered, trying to will fresh tears from welling up in her eyes again.

"Oh, Sarah …" The rustling and movement she heard behind the door told her that her father had sat down next to the door, mirroring her own position. When he talked again, his voice was tight and uncertain, but earnest. "You didn't do anything wrong, I just – you didn't do _anything_, sweetie. I was just a bit startled."

_Yeah, right_. It was an outrageous lie, and he probably knew she knew it, but she was willing to go with it for the time being.

"You totally freaked out. Freaked _me_ out, too." Her breath still hitched a bit in her chest, but it was less ragged. Her hands had finally stopped shaking, though. "I don't get it."

"It's a bit … Well. It's a – it's not much, just a sentimental thing."

Her ears perked up at the subtle change in his voice. His usual on-again-off-again uncertainty was back full force.

"Come on, Dad, I'm completely clueless here but I _can_ tell that hat's not just a hat."

Even his silence sounded hesitating. She didn't know anyone else who could do that.

"No, you're right, it's not. It's a – a memory."

"A keepsake?"

"Yes."

"From who?" Maybe she should have asked "From what" but that hat had obviously belonged to someone. It was the first time she had seen an object that was so much _someone's_. She had never believed in ghosts, but that hat had something haunting to it. It wasn't just the odd smell, although that probably explained a lot.

"That guy … It's a man's hat, right?" She took the absence of response from the other side of the door as a confirmation and went on. "Was he a friend of yours?"

He didn't comment on her use of the past tense. But it was simple logic, really, when she thought about it. If this man had still been alive, her dad wouldn't have kept his hat along with memorabilia from his younger days.

It had absolutely nothing to do with a silly, absurd notion like ghosts. Even if it _was_ tempting.

"Yeah."

She wished she could see his face, because his voice suddenly sounded so old and sad – she could clearly picture his shoulders drooping – that she desperately wanted eye confirmation that he didn't _really_ feel that way.

"Yeah, he was my friend."

Her cheeks were no longer wet, but the now-dried tears had left her skin a bit stiff from the salt. She barely felt it as she inched closer to the door and rested her head there.

"He's – he died, didn't he?" she asked softly. There was a thick silence, and she wondered if he had nodded, even though she couldn't possibly see him. He did that a lot on the phone.

"How long ago, Dad?"

"Eighteen years next week."

So Sammy was partly right, then. The A.D. did come into play at one point.

"Was he in New York when – for the Alien Day?"

There was an intake of breath from the other side of the door.

"Ye― no. He wasn't exactly in New York."

Well, so much for Sammy's theory.

"It's a bit complicated. We – last time I saw him, I guess you can say we had a quarrel about something that was … Something that seemed very important at the time. And I guess he was right. Hell, I _knew_ he was right and I let him … "

There was meaning in spades behind those few words, tons of things he wasn't saying but was voicing anyway.

She heard something like a shuddering sigh from the other side of the door. It was a simple enough sound, but it was so laced with sorrow and regret that it made her suddenly cold.

"He died right in front of me, and all I could do was stand there and watch."

The voice was her dad's, of course, but the tone – and the words – were foreign to her again. Almost as though he had been speaking another language. The tone was heavy with self-dejection, and the words had a ring of hard, ice-cold truth to them.

She didn't know how that man had died, and it dawned on her that she would probably never work up the guts to ask. But it was obvious that her dad had been carrying this ghost with him for years.

A bout of completely irrational anger flared in her at that man whose death had damaged her dad so much it was still an open wound after all those years. Heck, the mere mention of it obviously shook him to the core.

It only lasted a second, but for that whole second she was furious at that man for having died and left her dad feeling so wretched.

The feeling was quickly replaced with a fleeting, but sharp remnant of the fear she'd felt a few minutes – or hours – earlier, and the hairs on her arms bristled as if she had been on the receiving end of a nasty case of static shock. Somewhere in her, the instinct she had listened to earlier came back full force and screamed at her to run or hide from this stranger who had been posing as her dad for seventeen years.

This time, however, she grit her teeth, leapt up and opened the door. Her father, still sitting outside, gave a small start and raised his head. There was a world of hurt in his brown eyes, but the warmth of recognition crept back into them as he blinked up owlishly at her.

"Oh – hello, sweetie. Can I come in, then?"

A small laugh forced its way out of Sarah's tight throat and escaped sounding halfway like a sob. This was typical Dad. The door had been open all the time – she didn't have a lock. Dad was perfectly aware of this; however, he respected her need for privacy and always knew when not to enter, waiting for the moment when she would let him in eventually. And she always did.

It appeared that this stranger was not so foreign, after all.

"Yeah," she said thickly, absently twisting the hem of her sweater sleeves. _I'm sorry for freaking out and taking off_, she couldn't say, hoping that it came across anyway. "'Course, Dad."

His face lit up with the slow smile Sarah knew so well. All the little wrinkles and dimples she was used to reappeared.

He fumbled up and there was a moment of slightly awkward silence as they stared at one another, each waiting for the other to make a move. Sarah didn't reach for hugs as often as her sister did – but then, as the baby of the family Sammy had no trouble with hugging – and her father respected that.

After a little while, he took out his glasses and cleaned them on an old handkerchief he fished from his pocket. When he put them back on, there was a familiar sparkle in his eyes that could mean only one thing …

"Say, Sarah, sweetie, I was thinking of something I reckon we should try out – do you still have that old pair of roller-skates of yours?"

… He had an idea.

Sarah nodded, grinning, and followed her dad to the basement, listening as he laid out his plans for propulsion improvement. _Maybe I shouldn't have asked him to take us to that re-run of the _Back to the Future_ sequels_.

Halfway down to the basement, though, she took her dad's hand as they walked. It felt like Dad's hands always felt: warm, strong, safe, full of little scratches and bumps he got from working in the basement. Just like they used to feel when she was Daddy's little girl, a brown-haired, skinny four-year-old with big feet and a curious streak. Nothing could touch her if he was there to hold her hand and protect her.

At the end of the day, her dad was not a foreigner at all – he was simply living with a ghost inside his head. But that was fine by her. She was good at sharing. She was also determined to fight that ghost tooth and nail should it ever get too close to threatening the finely-balanced mix of warmth, awkwardness, humour and sadness that was Sam Hollis. Whoever that man was, whatever he had been, however horrible watching him die must have been for Dad – if his shadow ever became too intrusive she was ready to nudge it until it crept back into its place and learned to nicely share her father's soul.

As she made up her mind firmly about this, she unconsciously gave her dad's hand a slight squeeze.

Because although Sarah Hollis couldn't understand her dad sometimes, really, she loved him anyway.

* * *

O_kay_ :o)

For ages I was unsure about this one, because it's really far from the _Watchmen_ universe, but I really wanted to delve at least a little into Dan's future with Laurie and their family, and I figured a stranger's (an original character, I mean) viewpoint could work. So I gave them two daughters, a younger one who notices but doesn't question much the subtle changes in their father's behaviour as the first days of November approach, and an older girl who's closer in a way to her dad, but doesn't understand and tries repeatedly. Hope I didn't go Mary-Sue on you folks, by the way.

If some eyebrows are raised at the mention of Dan/Sam putting too much sugar in his coffee … It was on purpose. For some reason, I see Dan keeping small reminders of his old life, and over-sweetening his coffee struck me as something he would do, perhaps even not consciously, to keep the memory of his former partner intact. Plus Laurie wouldn't be upset, not having known Rorschach enough to share a coffee with him. Hurm. Interesting mental picture :D

As for him not listening to Billie Holiday anymore … I don't know where this one came from, I think it just stemmed from the fact that he'd had to leave most of his stuff behind when they left New York, and I reckon that he left a pretty big record collection. After that, maybe he sort of gave up on the music as being part of his old life until his daughter unwittingly threw a particular memory back at him. The choice of _I Cover The Waterfront_ was completely deliberate by the way – talk about shameless plugs :o)

Hope you liked!

Belphegor :o]


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